Sensors Systems Lab

Kentucky Satellite Lab

Responsible Person: Jim Lumpp
Location: 553 F. Paul Anderson Tower

The Kentucky Space (formerly KySat) Projects train students in the dynamics of spacecraft design, construction, testing and operation as a means of extending science and technology education, R&D, innovation and economic development in Kentucky. The Kentucky Space projects will involve an ongoing continuum of satellite design, build and launch projects – each with increasing scope and complexity.

Computer Architecture Lab

Responsible Person: Robert Heath
Location: 556B F. Paul Anderson Lab

The Computer Architecture Laboratory,contains a diverse assortment of networked personal computers, engineering workstations, and other supporting laboratory equipment used by undergraduate and graduate students performing research and development in the general areas of Computer Engineering, Digital Signal Processing, Digital Control Systems, and Software Engineering. The personal computers and engineering workstations run or provide access, via the network, to a rich assortment of software and other computer systems used to support research and development in the areas of Computer Engineering (Research and Development of General Purpose, Special Purpose, and Application Specific Computer Architectures including Uniprocessor, Parallel, Distributed, Data-Driven, Hybrid, Reconfigurable, and Dynamic Computer Architectures); Computer Aided Design; Specification and Verification of Digital System Models and Designs; Computer Performance Modeling and Evaluation; Co-Hardware and Software Development, Design, and Verification; Modeling, Design, Synthesis, and Testing of Digital Signal Processing and Control Systems; and Software Engineering. Laboratory equipment and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software is available allowing simulation, synthesis, and rapid systems prototyping, testing, and evaluation of experimental digital systems prototyped to the latest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) technology.

Space System Lab

Responsible Person: Jim Lumpp
Location: 559 F. Paul Anderson Tower

This lab is the premier embedded systems research lab at the University of Kentucky. Our expertise lies in highly dependable architectures for safety-critical applications.

Power System Lab

Open Computing Lab

Responsible Person: Hank Dietz
Location: 577 F. Paul Anderson Tower

A high-performance computing system is not created by accident, but by the careful design and implementation of interactions between Compilers, Hardware Architectures, and Operating Systems. The University of Kentucky’s KAOS group works to create, demonstrate, and disseminate technologies that can improve performance or provide new capabilities by integrating different aspects of computer system design. This systems research is not limited to systems hardware and software, but also includes working with application developer collaborators to port, tune, and enhance their codes.

Software is a key part of any computer system. The primary focus of the KAOS Software Development lab is to invent, create, and maintain the system software that will allow higher performance to be achieved. The goal is not just to build fragile prototypes, but also to devise robust mechanisms that can result in useful software distributions. This research work includes support for custom hardware (developed in the Hardware Development & Maintenance Facility), operating system extensions, compiler technology, middleware, and application libraries. Not only does this laboratory offer workstations with access to the supercomputers in the Supercomputer Machine Room, but is also provides access to the workstation hardware and one or more “safe playground” clusters constructed specially for software testing.

Digital Circuits Lab

Electronic Circuits Lab

Electron Devices Research Lab (EDRL)

Responsible Person: Vijay Singh
Location: 651 F. Paul Anderson Tower

The laboratory is equipped to perform research in electroluminescent displays, solar cells, magnetic sensing, and novel approaches to nanocrystalline material fabrication and application to electronic and magnetic devices. The ability to measure current, voltage, luminance in electroluminescent displays is available on an air stabilized optical table. Also available is a solar simulator that mimics the intensity of the sun for solar cell testing. A fume hood is available in the laboratory for device fabrication and processing. An example of a type of processing of solar cells includes solution growth of cadmium sulfide for use as a semiconductor in cadmium sulfide/cadmium telluride devices.

Electromagnetic Lab

Parellel SupercomputeringMachine Room

Responsible Person: Hank Dietz
Location: 672 F. Paul Anderson Tower

A high-performance computing system is not created by accident, but by the careful design and implementation of interaction between Compilers, Hardware Architectures, and Operating Systems. The University of Kentucky’s KAOS group works to create, demonstrate, and disseminate technologies that can improve perforamce or provide new capabilities by intergrating different aspect of computer design. This system research is not limited to systems hardware and software, but also includes working with application developer collaborators to port, tune, and enhance their codes.

Engineering, prototyping, and evaluating new supercomputing technologies require that KAOS construct and operate a variety of supercomputers configured to facilitate our research. Thus, we need to have a laboratory that not only can house a variety of experimental supercomputers, but also can make it easy for us to access, measure, and modify the system hardware and software. The KAOS Supercomputer Machine Room, 672 Anderson Tower, is a laboratory designed to provide for precisely these needs. As of March 2003, the KAOS Supercomputer Machine Room houses the award-winning KLAT2 (Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2) supercomputer and four smaller cluster supercomputers.

This lab is part of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering(CeNSE). CeNSE is a shared user facility established to encourage the development of materials, devices, solar energy and sensors at the Nanoscale. More than $2 million has been invested in basic fabrication techniques of film deposition, lithographic pattern definition, and material etching that will enable leading edge research in a variety of fields. In addition to the more conventional Silicon based transistor devices, simple metal/insulator circuit patterns that incorporate self assembly chemistry of tailored receptors could be used to produce biological sensors. Highly multi-disciplinary research efforts are easily facilitated. CeNSE is a resource for Kentucky’s development of both innovative academic research and the realization of emerging commercial ideas.

This lab is also part of the CeNSE facilities. It is used to deposit and condition films that are used to provide a basis for the devices and sensors produced by center researchers. The state of the art equipment is availble for use in multi-disciplinary efforts and can be accessed through the CeNSE web site.

Sputter Deposition

This lab is also part of CeNSE facilities and contains the tools to deposit metallic materials and insulates that can be either be evaporated or sputter deposited. It is here that the devices and sensors are enabled by forming contacting metallurgy that will be electrically accessible.

E-Beam and Metrology Room

Responsible Person: Todd Hastings
Location: A045 ASTeCC

This lab, a part of the CeNSE facility provides the ability to do advance nano scale lithography, and to resolve topography at the atomic scale as well as provide researchers with a methodololgy to determine the absorpton or de-absorption of materials on a subsrate at nanogram quantities.

Film Deposition Lab

Responsible Person: Zhi Chen
Location: 349 ASTeCC

Welding Research Lab

Responsible Person: Yu-ming Zhang
Location: 119 Center for Mfg (RMB)

The Welding Research Laboratory is a part of the University of Kentucky Manufacturing Center, a unit of the University of Kentucky’s College of Engineering. The center has several laboratories that perform research focusing on the advancement of manufacturing processes. As one of these research laboratories, the Welding Research Laboratory has received extensive support from the National Science Foundation, the army, and the Navy to develop applicable new welding control technologies. Partners include NASA, Electric Boat Corporation, Allison Engine Company, Pratt & Whitney, Thermal Arc, Inc., The Lincoln Electric Company, Ford Motor Company, Motor Wheels Corporation, Central Manufacturing Company, Thompson Steel Pipe Company, and others.

Applied Machine Vision Lab

Responsible Person: Yu-ming Zhang
Location: 119 Center for Mfg (RMB)

Working closely with the automotive and piping industries, the vision laboratory has focused on developing automated real-time systems that can inspect weld quality and control adaptive welding. These new inspection systems can spot defects like undercuts, porosity, craters, burning-through, and penetration insufficiency at a frame rate of up to 1000 images per second. The adaptive welding systems can adjust torch and welding parameters on-line, based on real-time measurement of the groove geometry (for the root pass) and weld profiles (for the succeeding pass).

Multimedia Information Analysis (MIA) Laboratory

This mission of the MIA Laboratory is to build efficient, robust and secure multimedia systems. In the past two decades, we have witnessed the most dramatic increase in computation power and communication bandwidth in human history. These advances have broken many barriers in creating, transmitting, and storing large volume of digital data — the most significant are the multimedia data from entertainment, business and education, as well as the scientific data from scientific experiments and medicine. Much of these data are voluminous, high-dimensional and under stringent real-time constraint. To understand and extract features from these data that are most important to the human user, to deliver these information to the end user anywhere at any time, and to protect any sensitive information against malicious attacks without sacrificing their utitilities are the main goals of the research conducted at the MIA Laboratory. Our primarily research areas are multimedia processing, privacy-enhancing technologies, pattern recognition, and information retrieval. Please visit our laboratory website at http://www.vis.uky.edu/mialab for more information about our current and past projects.